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An anonymous reader writes "While Disney and others have done a great job pushing the end date for works entering the public domain ever further forward, most people have assumed that anything from before 1923 is in the public domain. However, it turns out that this is not true for sound recordings, in part due to an accidental quirk in copyright law history — in that Congress, way back in 1909, believed that sound recordings could not be covered by copyright (they believed the Constitution did not allow recordings to be covered), and thus, some state laws stepped up to create special copyrights for sound recordings. A court ruling then said that these state rules were not overruled by federal copyright law. End result? ANY recorded work from before 1972 (no matter how early it was recorded) won't go into the public domain until 2049 at the earliest."

It looks like my epic youtube video made up entirely of WWI soundclips will have to be put on hold. And yes, a video made entirely of soundclips. What now, huh?

I'm interested however in the equivalent laws over here in the UK. Are we bound to the USA's system as part of some global copyright law thingy? I don't pretend to understand Public Domain, but I'd like to.

So I have several acetate discs from a radio studio in New York. They were recordings of the very first days of America's involvement in World War II. The radio network was purchased years ago and is owned by one of the "big boys" now. (Sucks how Clear Channel owns everything...) As far as we have been able to find, I am the only person even with any record (read knowledge) of this particular recording. So I have a piece of history that hasn't been released and would be really good to have in the public domain.

So seeing that I am probably the only person that has this copyrighted material, whose rightly is it? Mine, the one guy in ten who was careful to not throw this old acetate disc of the estate? Or does it belong to that fat Clear Channel CEO who is at this very moment doing a line of coke off his secretary's &#*@?

IANAL: Possession does not play into this. The copyright most likely belongs to the radio station in New York. If not them, then the artist(s) that recorded the discs. Unless you have a document showing the transfer of the copyright to you, then you do not own the material. If the copyright owner decides that they want the recordings back, then you will probably have to turn it over to them.

I would suggest that you ask the Smithsonian. If you would like the recordings to go into the public domain, then I suggest that they might be the proper avenue.

If the copyright owner decides that they want the recordings back, then you will probably have to turn it over to them.

While the first part of your post was spot on, I don't believe this to be the case.The owner of the copyright can sue you if you make copies of this material or if you play it for an audience, but there is nothing at all that they can do to force you to turn over the material to them, or even provide them a copy. If they didn't think it valuable enough to keep a copy (or the originals) for themselves, that's their fault, not yours.

> So seeing that I am probably the only person that has this copyrighted material

Your case underlines the bizarre "logic" of modern copyright law. Since you own the media, it is perfectly legal for you to destroy the recordings, which would, of course, destroy the "property" of the rightsholders (since they are the only copy). One wonders how that weird edge case fits into the "you wouldn't steal" rhetoric.

On the other hand, it's totally illegal for you to distribute these recordings to anyone except the rightsholders themselves. So it is effectively illegal for you to preserve this work for future generations.

This is why I do not feel bad in the least to advise you to digitize the recordings and upload them to some filesharing site like RapidShare or MegaUpload in an anonymous way, and then publicize the sharing link on a web forum where there will be a lot of interested people (I'm sure there must be some web forums where WWI history buffs hang out). Much as I like creators to be able to get paid, I hate even more for culture and information to be lost.

The summary and TFA are a little overblown. Works made between 1923 and 1972 might not enter the public domain in some states (probably California) before 2049 at the earliest, but it may already be in the public domain in other states. On the one hand, since New York was and still is a hub of the radio and entertainment industry they may have made a special provision for copyrighting audio recordings. On the other, it may be permissible to drive over the bridge to New Jer

How long does copyright last for?
Copyright generally lasts for the lifetime of the creator and then to the end of the 70th year afterwards. So for Elgar, say, who died in 1934, his original music came out of copyright in 2005. However copyright also exists in the editing, arrangement and reconstruction of previous music compositions and only expires 70 years after the death of the editor, etc. Copyright in recordings lasts for 50 years.

I've been threatened over trademark because of international agreements (trademark of a descriptive phrase that I was using in a descriptive manner) so the WIPO treaties probably do allow international copyright claims as well. If nothing else, you won't be able to put it up on YouTube if any of the content is American because you're treading in their legal territory.

Trademark law can get pretty ridiculousExample: some US company trademarked the term "sugercraft" somehow despite it being a commonly used term for an entire profession (imagine if some company trademarked "programming") and sends similar letters to companies which use the term.

Trademark and copyright are completely separate systems. Arguments from one do not copy over to the other.

But the publishers of mass-market works of authorship set in fictional universes, who license the trademarks and copyrights related to a fictional universe as a unit, want end users to forget how separate these systems of exclusive rights are. So they use phrases such as "intellectual property" that confuse the two [gnu.org].

No, we're not bound by foreign laws when on UK ground. Look at Naxos, the record label which sells historical recordings, although some are considered piracy in the US. So Americans can't buy them, and are instead forced to resort to..uh..piracy if they want them. It's a funny old world, isn't it.

Right, and English is a funny language. He probably could have been more explicit by stating "So Americans can't buy them in America". But, IANAL, I think goods that would normally be illegal to purchase in the USA also cannot be transported into the USA (despite all the fake Gucci, fOakleys, Cubans, etc that make it here from China).

There are international treaties regarding copyright that many countries, including the UK and the US, have signed. But that only means each country has to follow what the treaty says; it doesn't mean a law in one country automatically becomes law in the other.

Every time I start to feel a shred of guilt about my rampant piracy, I read something like this. Then the guilt goes away. Copyright is a corrupt system, which no longer serves it's original purpose of promoting production of useful art. Instead it is nothing but a mechanism to ensure maximum profits for those least deserving, and to make sure that the public domain remains small and legally dangerous enough to pose no serious competition. I pay copyright law no respect, and will not do so unless it it reformed to bring it back in line with sensible terms, make it less biased towards those who can afford millions of dollars in legal fees and eliminate the possibility of copyright being abused as a tool to censor criticism or prevent interoperability.

There's an easy solution to #3, don't listen to commercial radio. There's plenty of legal alternatives out there, plus a whole crap load of genuinely brilliant material out there that you wouldn't hear on the radio anyways. I've heard that there's a lot of really cool English language stuff coming out of Japan that's really tough to get access to in the US.

While I don't think it's a blanket justification for piracy (some people actually DESERVE copyright protections), I have to sympathize. I used to teach a class that dealt briefly with copyright. At one time, I thought all the "Author plus 70 years, different in x circumstances" formulas. But in the late 90's I just simplified it to "If it's not public domain right now, it never will be" and left it at that.

And call me mean, but I'm glad Sonny Bono hit that fucking tree. I just hope there is a special place

You know what? If you said you disagreed with traditional copyright and so would only listen to copyleft/public domain music, and use open source software, etc, then I'd have a lot of respect for you. But saying you disagree with the mechanism by which a creator has chosen to be compensated and yet still choosing to benefit from their work, well that just makes you a freeloading cheapass.

Ultimately, the people themselves do. Governments can pass any laws they like, but if the overwhelming majority of the population chooses to ignore it/them, there is no possible way for a government to enforce said law in any effective way.

"An unjust law, is no law at all." -Martin Luther King Jr.

The part about "..is no law at all" is both a moral and practical description when the general population decides to ignore such unjust laws.

That's not whats being said. He is taking this on a personal level. There is a mechanism for protesting these laws - appeals, lawsuits, higher courts, legislation, etc.

Even Cicero knew a thousand and change years ago that even when unjust laws were past, that the courts would turn around and agree that the state has the right. Unjust laws are a matter of perspective, but it seems to me that there's a clear number of people worldwide that agree that the current state of copyright is bad. Especially if we go by the tired RIAA stats.

There is also a difference between laws on a populace, and laws of populace. The two of which you're confusing.

Your taking it a bit far. Copyright laws are not as important, or useful, as laws against murder, actual theft, or sex crimes. In theft you deprive someone of real property, and not just potential profit, in murder your depriving someone of their life as opposed to potential profit, and sex crimes your depriving people of bodily freedom as opposed to potential profit. Copyright downright inconsequential compared to your slippery slope examples.

Can you prove that anyone who made those recordings actually chose to put them under this system? I don't anyone recording something in WWI really gave two shits about copyright when they recorded it and created it.

I was ambivalent on the copyright issue for a long time. Then I read about the economic theory behind copyright, and realised that it was actually harmful to society at large.

From an economic point of view, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a person, A, getting something for free (for example, by copying a computer program). It essentially means that a value has been created from nothing - that value has been added to the total value produced by society. Nobody would be better off if A was deprived tha

Now, combine this understanding with the fact that most copyrighted products generate most of their income in the first few years after publication, or even less, and you realise that a copyright term of more than a few years has no benefits to society. It almost exclusively does harm, by preventing values to be produced for free.

I would have little problem with a 14 year copyright term. The worry with short copyright terms is that too many people may just wait until the term expired, so that they could get the work for free. Consider a shorter term of 7 years. It is feasible in some media, books especially, to wait 7 years to buy and read the book. Commercial exploitation of a franchise in a different media can often wait that long, such as a filmmaker waiting to adapt a book into a movie if it let them completely cut the book's authors out of the equation.

But 14 years is long enough that in the vast majority of media few people would find it worth waiting, if they could afford to buy it. Futhermore, by 14 years works in almost every medium have all but exhausted their profit making potential.

Music is actually the odd one out here, considering the money songs from the 80's or earlier can still bring in, be it by royalties by the "oldies" stations, and continual sales of albums. Granted though that even here, the overwhelming majority of the profit should have been made in the first year or so, when the song was popular, so cutting off the revenue at 14 years is still within reason.

It is interesting to think about what would be now be in the public domain for computers/tech with a 14 year copyright limit. The clasic NES-era video games would be in the public domain, as well as many of the 16-bit era classics. Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0 (but just barely, so Microsoft could withhold the patches later released for both OS's, if they wanted), and thus also MS-DOS and the older Windows. Pretty much all the software for older historic machines, be it the VAX, or the C64. All the classic UNIXs,.... The list is just astounding.

Now, combine this understanding with the fact that most copyrighted products generate most of their income in the first few years after publication, or even less, and you realise that a copyright term of more than a few years has no benefits to society. It almost exclusively does harm, by preventing values to be produced for free.

Can I summarize your entire post to, "We should return copyright protection in the USA to 14 years with a 14 year extension as in the 1790 Copyright Act"?

"The Congress shall have Power [...] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"

"by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"

So, Authors can be given the exclusive right to sell, perform, use, whatever, things they've made or discovered. Cool. Except that right extends beyond the author's death- either to his/her estate, or whatever corporation had been given it.

What is the Constitutional rationale for rights extending after death? I can't imagine it promoting useful art.

News flash: Copyright existed, and should exist, to allow an individual to profit from their creation

... for a limited time. Odds are that the "artist" doing the recordings during WW I isn't alive, and won't certainly be alive in 2049. I'm not advocating rampant piracy, but let's get real about the intended nature of copyright.

Odds are that the "artist" doing the recordings during WW I isn't alive

Using copyright royalties as a substitute for an annuity, in order to ensure that your great-grandchildren have a roof over their heads, is still profit. The Supreme Court has declined to second-guess the validity of Congress's attempts "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".

You want to ensure that your great-grandchildren have a roof over their heads? Encourage your children to tell their children to study hard in school, learn a useful trade, and get a job, so they can provide for their children. You're not supposed to have to pay for that yourself.

When did the establishment of a hereditary leisure class become a social good?

This. I made the same comment in another story [slashdot.org] just yesterday. When you make something or provide a service to the community, you get paid for it. Society says, "thanks for doing that". That money is your influence within that community. The more good you do for the community, the more money/influence you have.

How the hell do you justify being able to pass on that influence to your kids? That doesn't benefit your community in any way. If you pass on the ability to do what you did - a skill, a trade, etc.,

-Encourage your children to tell their children to study hard in school, learn a useful trade-

-Without some source of income, the kids won't have the money to go to a good school in order to study hard.-

That involves a different and separate societal arrangement between two parties; employment. It works for everyone else that doesn't hold copyrights on valuable works. Why should the descendants of copyright holders be the exception?

In other words, tell the lazy kids to get a job or hope that grand-dad left

A job counts as "some source of income". It was enough for my parents. And theirs. And so on. Somehow, we've managed for generations without the patronage of a rich ancestor! I'm sure that our descendants will also.

(And in most of the civilized world, you can get a decent-to-excellent education even without your parents having a job.)

can't reproduce building stiles (ah! imagine having the copyright of Gothic arcs, or domes)

I understand your point, but this wasn't the best example. Generic building styles would fall under the "scenes a faire" doctrine [wikipedia.org], which exempts nonliteral copying of elements common in a genre.

And the ultimate seat of authority, we the people, have decided otherwise

No we haven't. If we the people want copyright reform, we the people will elect representatives to enact it. But given the bipartisan support that things like the Copyright Term Extension Act and Digital Millennium Copyright Act have enjoyed, this has not yet happened. I'll believe you once we the people have elected enough members of the United States Pirate Party [wikipedia.org] to the Congress to make the Republican and Democratic caucuses consider a coalition.

It doesn't work that way any more (if it ever even did). When I go to the voting booth, I get to choose between copyright extension supporter A and copyright extension supporter B. No thanks. I'll just copy freely and under the radar, like many, many more people do.

Well, I indeed use it as an excuse for theft. I go into the store and steal the DVDc, CDs and books I want. I even steal the DVD players and TV sets to use them. That way when somebody raids my house and sees I have about 10.000 CDs and DVDs that where stolen, I will be paying much less then somebody who did some copyright infringement of 3 numbers on their mp3 player from an album they bought.

Bradley Wernham, 19, responsible for a £1million crime spree, was spared a prison sentence last October after police told a judge he had turned his life around.Wernham was given a community service order instead and relocated to another town where he was given a flat rent-free.

I agree. The individual artist should be able to profit from their work for the rest of their life. The problem is that a copyright lasts long after the artist is gone. Why does an estate get to profit off the work of a dead individual? If the owner in question is a corporation then the copyright should be valid for a fixed period of time. I would be ok with using the figure of the life expectancy of a female child born in the year the work was created. A female child born in 2003 has a life expectanc

The individual artist should be able to profit from their work for the rest of their life.

Why? I can invent something that saves people's lives and get protection for 20 years under patent law, but some crappy pop song should get protection for the rest of that person's life? Something is wrong there. Why not make it a fixed length of 20 years also?

When you say "should be able to profit" you mean of course be granted a legal monopoly. An artist can profit from their work without any legal protection.

The individual artist should be able to profit from their work for the rest of their life.

Why? The rest of us actually have to work - we don't get to show up for a few weeks and then say "You have to pay me for the rest of my life for that work". Giving them a few years of copyright to make money off of it, sure, I'm fine with that. However, it's BS for them to get paid to sit back and do nothing for 60+ years because once upon a time, they wrote a few songs.

Copyright existed, and should exist, to allow an individual to profit from their creation. It has not a damned thing to do with producing useful art

In reality of course the whole point of copyright was to promote works of art and scientific discoveries. In the US this purpose is even spelled outright in the Constitution where it reads: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.".

The Founding Fathers (Jefferson particularly [uchicago.edu] ) were very uneasy about granting effective monopoly to authors at the expense of the general public and so they sought to allow it only if the general public benefited from such an arrangement more then it had to invest (in terms of enforcing such a law).

News flash: Copyright existed, and should exist, to allow an individual to profit from their creation. It has not a damned thing to do with producing useful art. The production of useful art is a result of the desire to PROFIT.

That's a bit too extreme. I for one would fix copyright terms at ten, maybe twenty years. Probably just a decade, though. That is ample time for the author to get all deserved profit, but short enough for the work to still be culturally relevant when it enters the public domain.

Coming from the UK, I can understand how people can be extradited on US federal law charges. I'd be surprised if state laws apply too.
For that matter how does this affect US citizens in say NY if the law is broken in CA?

If you are a CA citizen and commit a crime in NY, you can be extradited from CA to NY.

If you harm me in NY, I can file suit against you in NY and if you don't show up to the trial, you lose.

If you violate my copyright in NY (assuming NY has these laws), if I can convince a judge that the jurisdiction that your action injured me in was NY (because I was injured and that is where I was) and thus NY has jurisdiction, I can file a lawsuit. You can pay a lawyer to fight f

Did all States create those copyright laws? Or did just some of them do? And what about materials recorded abroad, or broadcast abroad? Enforcing copyright law on a State by State level would seem to me like a very difficult thing to do.

According to one commentator, Congress had two principal concerns about sound recordings, leading it to decline to protect them. First, Congress wondered about the constitutional validity of such protection. The Constitution allows Congress to protect "writings," and Congress was uncertain as to whether a sound recording could constitute a writing. Second, Congress worried that allowing producers to exclusively control both the musical notation and the sound recording could lead to the creation of a music monopoly.

More like a music industry that was starting from the ground up, and hadn't achieved the same lobbying clout as other industries at the time, such as railroads and finance. The railroads in particular were notorious for basically showing up in Washington DC with a few trunks full of cash and inviting each congressman in turn to take his share. That's why to "railroad" a bill through is to more-or-less force it without any consideration of the merits.

According to one commentator, Congress had two principal concerns about sound recordings, leading it to decline to protect them. First, Congress wondered about the constitutional validity of such protection. The Constitution allows Congress to protect "writings," and Congress was uncertain as to whether a sound recording could constitute a writing. Second, Congress worried that allowing producers to exclusively control both the musical notation and the sound recording could lead to the creation of a music monopoly.

I found this to be the more interesting and exciting part of that quote:

Congress wondered about the constitutional validity of such protection.

That was probably the last time the constitutionality of a law actually came up in Congress...

No, it would apply to works created in other countries, but only in the US. Outside the US, local copyright laws apply. This is oversimplifying it a little, but.... international copyright law doesn't care where the work was created; under both Berne and the UCC, all works get the same treatment in any given country, regardless of origin.

But according to this article, the scope is actually more specific than that. The argument is that individual state laws are prov

That's right, copyright is STEALING! It is stealing history and culture from future generations. It is stealing from the global knowledge of humanity. Not just infringed upon; information is locked up until it rots in to nothingness.

I have no specific desire to take control of mickey-frikkin-mouse away from the Walt Disney Corporation, or similar works from their holders. But I believe the original idea of copyright was to benefit humanity by encouraging people to create more works by granting an author the PRIVILEGE to control how their work was distributed for a limited time.

However, if a holder does not ultimately contribute something back to humanity in exchange for this privilege, then they are literally stealing from humanity.

The current system effectively prevents these works from continuing to benefit and enrich humanity after they are out of print by failing to permit works from entering the public domain in a timely manner if ever. This needs to be fixed.

For a person or entity to retain control over a work indefinitely, such as current laws essentially permit, is STEALING from humanity.

The creation of orphan works is the greatest crime of all. And I have to wonder if the RIAA/etc are trying to use an orphan work strategy to suppress and destroy vast amounts of older works as a mechanism to encourage you to buy their new stuff.

There is a very simple way to fix the orphan work problem. First 10 years copyright is free. For each 10 years after that it has to be renewed with a payment of say $5,000. If your work isn't generating enough income to cover a $500/yr renewal fee it isn't economica

So artists shouldn't have property rights? I've already been told by a lawyer that existing contracts I have over a recent work shouldn't have existed because generally artists in my business aren't allowed to retain rights to their work. Translation it's okay for companies to own and profit from those rights but not artists. Now I'm being told those rights shouldn't have existed in the first place? Now how exactly am I supposed to make a living if I don't have any rights to sell? We don't generally have pa

While I was writing my philosophy thesis, I discovered that many of G.K. Chesterton's works that he wrote in Britain between 1923 and 1936 when he died are public domain in Britain, where they were published.

But they are not public domain in the U.S.

One of my unfinished projects is to combine all his works that are public domain, and throw a full text index on it to make a little G.K. exclusive search engine -- but we're going to have to go with a non-U.S. ISP if I ever do get around to getting it off the ground.

It works the other way around as well. The US vs. pretty much the rest of the world use different milestones to calculate copyright expiration. In the US it's the date of creation, elsewhere it's date of the creator's death. So for a long-lived creator who got an early start on his career, copyright on his early works would expire sooner in the US than elsewhere*, but for a short-lived creator or one who created works shortly before his death, those works will generally expire sooner in the rest of the w

If a recorded item, writing or whatnot is considered valuable, then the owner should have to buy a license to keep it out of the public domain after a reasonable and free period of time (like the original 7 years). after the free period is over the owner would have to make a determination if the item is valuable enough to pay for to keep it out of the public domain. This protects Mickey, but releases a whole slew of recordings and books that have no commercial viability.

I could care less about Mickey. It's all the music, art and books that are way less "popular" that are hiding in vaults that the public eye will never see again because they are under copyright (by corporations), but at the same time, not cost effective to keep on the shelves.

So, hopefully, in these economically-difficult times, some rights-holder someplace gets a coupla thousand bucks from some hip-hop artist intent upon incorporating turn-of-the-century jazz recordings into his latest opus.

Yes, I'm sure all those artists who died more than 70 years ago (remember, we're talking about recordings that would have been Public Domain under federal law) will be extremely pleased. Dead, but pleased.

The new findings are not a disaster, it's just yet another example of the ongoing insanity that copyright has become.

So, hopefully, in these creativity-starved times, some hip-hop artist forgoes mashing-up some other creator's work and goes the extra mile to invent something brand new.

There is nothing truly new. Even the most original composer is 90% influenced by the music he has already heard. Getting a jazz musician to play your newly composed jazz solo costs time and money. Sampling is a way for musicians without oodles of money (i.e 90% of them) to make decent music easier. It makes more people able to participate in the creation of our culture.

So, hopefully, some student whose research involves early recordings can't find what he needs on the Internet and visits a library for only the second or third time in his life, and a hundred news worlds are opened to him.

So, hopefully, in these creativity-starved times, some hip-hop artist forgoes mashing-up some other creator's work and goes the extra mile to invent something brand new.

Even people who try to create something that they think is original sometimes fail. It isn't directly applicable to the case of the article (reproduction of sound recordings), but George Harrison got sued and lost when it was discovered he had accidentally copied the ten-note hook (5~ 3~ 2~, 5 6 8 6 8 8) from "He's So Fine" into his song "My Sweet Lord".

No such thing. There are only unique combinations of what already exists. And more often than not, more than one person will independently come up with the same combination, which only further illustrates the absurdity of copyright, patent, and trademark law...

The optimist is disappointed, the pessimest can be happily surprised. Hope for the best, but plan for the worst.

some rights-holder someplace gets a coupla thousand bucks from some hip-hop artist intent upon incorporating turn-of-the-century jazz recordings into his latest opus

Rather, some creative musical genius doesn't give his gifts to the world because it resembles a phrase from some 1920 jazz he's never heard, and is sued into bankrupcy and commits suicide, depriving the world of his gifts.

Your attempt at insight aside, the limited time span of Copyright is designed to increase the availability of the arts to everyone in the long run by creating a temporary monopoly on a work for profit to be gained so as to encourage the creation of works that will end up in the public domain eventually.

The goal is to have all of this creativity available to everyone for free, that's the destiny of the work. The temporary profiteering is allowed to encourage creativity from people who are monetarily driven.

Libraries bypass this system by actually purchasing works and then making them available free, entirely bypassing the intent of Copyright to our benefit.

The Berne convention may complicate things. It means that works should be treated as if they were copyrighted locally, so a work from outside Ohio would be covered by copyright in Ohio. If you distribute it in Ohio, the owner would be able to get a judgement against you there and the fine would then become a debt, which could be collected locally wherever you happened to be in the USA. If you are outside the USA, you're probably safe though...

As I interpret it, the state law does not override the federal law, it merely amends it. The federal law says that the creator has an exclusive right for X years; the state law says that he has an exclusive right for Y years, where Y > X. Since having a right for X years does not contradict having it for X years plus some additional years, both laws can hold at the same time.